George W. Bush: The American Presidents Series: The 43rd President, 2001-2009

by James Mann

  The reason for this instability was another misjudgment. Bush and his team failed to plan properly for postwar operations in Iraq. The United States simply did not have enough troops to keep things calm. The forces that were there were not prepared for what they were about to face. Before the war, the Pentagon and the State Department had engaged in continual bickering over the reconstruction of Iraq and its political leadership after Saddam Hussein. As was often true in his first years in the White House, Bush proved unable to gauge the depth or the impact of the personal and ideological battles being waged beneath him.

  Years later, Bush acknowledged ruefully that, even though he thought the United States was prepared to deal with postwar Iraq, “our nation building capabilities were limited, and no one knew for sure what needs would arise.” He had relied on assurances from Rumsfeld and military leaders that the U.S. troop levels for postwar Iraq were sufficient. He had, in fact, relied on his advisers for many of his judgments about war with Iraq. One of the tasks of an American president, however, is to be skeptical of the advice he is getting and to sense when the predictions of what will come are governed more by hope than by reality.

  6

  Reelection and Its Unhappy Aftermath

  George W. Bush had arrived in the White House as a novice in foreign policy but a very old hand at electoral politics. He had begun working in politics the year after his college graduation and had helped run several Senate and House races, his father’s three presidential campaigns, his own two gubernatorial campaigns, and his presidential campaign in 2000. It was easy to underestimate him as a politician, and he liked it that way. Bush knew all the drills: how to deflect an opponent’s charges, how to counterattack, how to stay on message.

  The presidential election of 2004 would be his last campaign, and he wanted to leave nothing to chance. Just after New Year’s Day in 2003, he sat down at his Texas ranch with Karl Rove to start planning his reelection campaign. Within months, they were deep into strategy: which states to go after and which themes to emphasize. After the start of the war in Iraq, Rove decided that the campaign should focus on portraying Bush as a “strong wartime leader.”

  In the summer of 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney told Bush at one of their weekly lunches that he would be willing to step aside the following year if Bush wanted a different running mate on the ticket. Cheney had become a lightning rod for criticism of the administration, and Bush did not immediately dismiss this offer, conferring briefly with close aides about replacing Cheney with Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader. Bush quickly decided, however, that while Cheney might be a political target in the campaign, he wanted Cheney as his vice president in the second term.

  At first, Bush hoped to run against Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, who emerged as an early front-runner for the Democratic nomination by courting the party’s vocal antiwar constituencies. Bush had known Dean when they were both governors and considered him shrill and undisciplined. To Bush’s disappointment, Dean’s candidacy collapsed, and Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, whom he considered a more formidable opponent, was chosen as the Democratic nominee.

  * * *

  Throughout Bush’s first term, amid the tumult of the overseas wars and antiterrorism measures, he had been attempting to establish a record at home on which he could run for reelection as a nondoctrinaire Republican.

  Bush’s tax cuts formed the core of his legacy in domestic policy, and his actions on environmental and right-to-life issues furthered the judgment of him as a president who stood decidedly to the right on the political spectrum. There were, however, a number of areas of domestic policy where Bush departed from conservative orthodoxy and from the unyielding approach he had displayed when he first took office. In some cases, he reluctantly accepted legislation sponsored by the Democrats. In other instances, he worked out compromises with the Democrats or put forward initiatives of his own that did not fit his conservative image.

  In July 2002, Bush signed into law a bill that considerably strengthened the ability of the federal government to investigate and prosecute corporate fraud. The legislation, sponsored by Democratic senator Paul Sarbanes and Republican representative Michael Oxley, was a congressional response to a series of corporate and accounting scandals. Enron, the Texas energy conglomerate whose chairman, Kenneth Lay, was a friend of Bush and a leading campaign contributor, had filed for bankruptcy in late 2001, and Worldcom, a prominent telecommunications firm, had similarly sought bankruptcy protection a half year later. Bush had fought many of the central provisions of the legislation until three weeks before he signed it, but then, in the wake of the collapse of Worldcom, he reversed course and decided to endorse the measure. For years afterward, business groups and libertarian conservative organizations complained about the impact of Sarbanes-Oxley and called for its repeal, maintaining that its reporting requirements were too onerous and that it was a symbol of an overly intrusive federal government.

  Bush’s decision to expand Medicare angered conservatives even more. In the fall of 2003, he signed legislation under which Medicare began to pay for prescription drugs, thus establishing a new entitlement (called Medicare Part D) that even supporters acknowledged would be extraordinarily costly. It amounted to the biggest expansion of the Medicare program since its creation in 1965.

  Indeed, whenever Bush spoke about the new prescription-drug benefit, his language sounded like that of a conventional liberal. He portrayed his program as an effort to meet social needs and as a progressive advance for the welfare state. “Medicare’s most antiquated feature was that it did not cover prescription drugs,” he wrote in his memoir. “The program would pay $28,000 for ulcer surgery, but not $500 a year for pills that would prevent most ulcers. I was struck by the stories of older Americans who had to choose between buying groceries and medicine.”

  Yet beyond these sympathies, Bush may also have been influenced by political and economic factors. He proposed the expansion of Medicare just as he was preparing to run for reelection. America’s leading pharmaceutical companies, which contribute heavily to political campaigns, strongly supported the new drug benefit; so did the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), the principal organization for the elderly, an important electoral constituency.

  Moreover, Bush initially viewed the new drug benefit as a means of accomplishing one of his broader conservative goals: the privatization of America’s social programs. His original proposal would have required those seeking prescription drug subsidies to give up their government-run Medicare and instead enroll in private insurance programs for all of their health care. “By delivering the drug benefit through private insurance plans that compete for seniors’ business, we could inject market forces into the health care system,” Bush argued.

  Republican congressional leaders told Bush there was no way such a privatization measure could win passage, because Democrats would never support a change in the fundamental nature of Medicare. Bush then retreated, proposing legislation under which the overall Medicare program would remain unchanged but for the addition of a new drug benefit run by private insurers. Yet even this narrower legislation ran into intense opposition in Congress: most Democrats refused to support an augmented role for private insurers, while conservative Republicans were loath to create a new drug benefit at all. The vote in Congress was so close that it required extraordinary tactics by Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert and by Bush himself to push the bill through. The bill was rejected in an initial House vote at three o’clock one morning. Instead of accepting the result, Hastert kept the vote open while Bush made a few phone calls in the predawn hours to wavering Republicans. By early morning, the result was reversed: the House approved the bill 220 to 215, and the drug benefit became law.

  Bush launched one other social initiative with enduring impact: a campaign of unprecedented scope and with significant U.S. government funding to combat AIDS in Africa. Under his plan, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEP
FAR), the U.S. government gave an initial $15 billion over five years to pay the costs for prevention and treatment of AIDS, a sum vastly larger than that contributed by other nations or by the Clinton administration. Much of the money went toward the purchase of antiretroviral drugs. A common assumption at the time was that antiretroviral drugs would not be effective in Africa, because many AIDS victims there would not be able to take the drugs on the regular, specific timetable that is required. The PEPFAR program proved this assumption to be wrong.

  As with Bush’s expansion of Medicare, there may have been considerations of timing and of domestic politics. Although American conservatives had for years attacked the general concept of foreign aid, the specific idea of combating AIDS in Africa was especially popular with evangelical Christians. Moreover, Bush announced the PEPFAR program only a few weeks before the invasion of Iraq; it thus served as a reminder, amid the acrimony over the war, that the United States could use its power as a force for good in the world.

  Nevertheless, it also seems clear that in establishing the PEPFAR program, domestic political considerations were not paramount and that Bush was motivated primarily by altruistic considerations. He had long claimed to represent a new form of compassionate conservatism, and the AIDS program was an instance where he sought to make this slogan a reality. He maintained interest in PEPFAR throughout his presidency. The Bush administration’s budget planners argued against such a large commitment of money for the program, but Bush brushed aside their concerns. Late in his presidency, as the original five-year authorization ran out, he proposed doubling the money to $30 billion over the following five years. Eventually, Congress (then controlled by the Democrats) approved that amount and more.

  Bush’s program engendered a series of side controversies. Some conservatives were unhappy that the AIDS program was distributing condoms. Liberals, on the other hand, ridiculed the part of the program that promoted abstinence. Meanwhile, consumer groups complained that PEPFAR was a boon to the pharmaceutical industry because it favored brand-name drugs over their generic counterparts. Still, Bush persevered, continuing to give high-level support, avoiding entanglement in these subsidiary issues. In time, Bush’s program became the largest single-nation health initiative in the world; by 2012, PEPFAR would provide antiretroviral drugs for more than 4.5 million people.

  * * *

  The biggest problem confronting Bush in his reelection campaign was that Iraq was increasingly turning into a disaster. The MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner of May 2003 came back to haunt him. What began as an outbreak of looting after American troops entered Baghdad descended into wider chaos and violence across the country. There were simply not enough American troops to maintain order.

  To stabilize the situation, Bush appointed L. Paul Bremer to head the new Coalition Provisional Authority with full administrative powers to govern Iraq until a new government could be formed. However, Bremer soon compounded the problems by issuing orders to disband the Iraqi army and to deny government jobs to all members of the Ba’ath Party, which had ruled the country under Saddam Hussein. The result was that many thousands of Iraqis, some of them armed, were left without jobs or a stake in a future government. In August 2003, a massive bomb at the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad killed the U.N.’s special representative Sergio Vieira de Mello, and two months later Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz barely escaped an attack in which rockets were fired at his Baghdad hotel. Worst of all for Bush, American forces found no weapons of mass destruction. Neither did other investigators over the following months and years. Saddam Hussein, it appeared, had been bluffing. Thus, the principal reason Bush had cited as justification for the war turned out to have been an illusion.

  In public, Bush and his aides often sought to minimize the problems. At the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld at first brushed off the looting with the quip, “Stuff happens.” Even as it became increasingly clear that organized groups were targeting the U.S. troops in an effort to dislodge them from Iraq, Rumsfeld for a time disputed the notion that America faced an “insurgency” in Iraq. For his own part, Bush taunted those in Iraq who sought to force the Americans out of the country. “My answer is: Bring ’em on,” he said. Amid the intensifying violence, Bush resisted sending more troops to Iraq because he did not want to reinforce the impression of an imperial America. But that strategy backfired; Bush ruefully acknowledged years later that it turned out that “the Iraqi people’s desire for security trumped their aversion to empire.”

  Bush’s fortunes got a huge boost in the final weeks of 2003, when Saddam Hussein was captured. Photographs of the bedraggled leader were soon displayed around the world, particularly inside Iraq, where they served as proof that there would be no comeback. Saddam Hussein’s regime was officially finished; the tyrant had been humbled. Within months, however, the impact of that image was soon overwhelmed by another set of photographs, ones that cast America’s occupation of Iraq in such a negative light that, as Condoleezza Rice later admitted, “We never recovered fully.” A group of U.S. soldiers had taken photos inside the infamous Abu Ghraib prison that showed Iraqi prisoners forced into humiliating poses, sometimes hooded or without clothes, while their American guards gloated.

  Rumsfeld had informed the president about reports of mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, but Bush had not seen the graphic images until the day they appeared on American television. He was appalled. “I considered it a low point of my presidency,” he wrote. He also felt blindsided, suddenly faced with an intense controversy he didn’t know was coming. Amid the furor that erupted, Rumsfeld twice submitted his resignation as defense secretary. Bush considered accepting it but instead sent the vice president to the Pentagon to plead with Rumsfeld to stay on the job. Bush asserted that the reasons he kept Rumsfeld on were that he had no immediate replacement and didn’t want to change defense secretaries in the middle of a war. One additional factor he didn’t mention was the timing: the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in the middle of an election year. Replacing Rumsfeld would have amounted to admitting that there was a problem in leadership in the wartime Pentagon; it would also have made it appear that the Bush administration was in disarray.

  In private, Bush was coming to that latter conclusion on his own. He was upset by the skirmishing within his foreign-policy team, both at the top, where Cheney disagreed regularly with Powell and Rice sparred with Rumsfeld, and at lower levels, where the subordinates of these officials waged proxy battles. At roughly the same time as the Abu Ghraib abuses came to light, Powell informed Bush he wanted to step down. Bush persuaded him to stay on until after the election, but the president also decided he needed a wholesale shake-up of the national security team in his second term.

  The most dramatic of the battles within the administration was hidden from public view at the time. It concerned the National Security Agency’s Terrorist Surveillance Program, the extensive monitoring instituted soon after September 11, which had to be reauthorized every forty-five days. In the early months of 2004, Justice Department lawyers, eventually supported by Deputy Attorney General James Comey, decided that several key aspects of the NSA program were illegal; they could not be justified under existing laws or the Constitution.

  Cheney had played a large role in creating the program and had remained closely involved in it. In early March, as the next reauthorization deadline loomed, the vice president and his legal adviser David Addington engaged in a tense confrontation with the Justice Department lawyers. Cheney tried but failed to overcome the objections of Comey and his aides. At the time, Attorney General John Ashcroft lay seriously ill in a Washington hospital. Bush dispatched White House chief of staff Andrew Card and White House counsel Alberto Gonzales to Ashcroft’s hospital room, seeking to ask the attorney general, barely conscious, to approve a continuation of the program. But Comey and two Justice Department lawyers beat the White House aides to the hospital and told the semiconscious attorney general what was happening. Ashcroft spurned the White House requests.
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  The issue went up to Bush, who at first decided to invoke his own presidential powers to overrule the Justice Department and extend the NSA surveillance. However, the Justice Department was by this time in open revolt. Comey informed the White House that he would resign if Bush unilaterally authorized the program. Government lawyers, not just at the Justice Department but also at the FBI and CIA, said that they would resign along with Comey; their numbers quickly swelled to two dozen, including some of Bush’s own political appointees. In what would have been the most damaging resignation of all, FBI director Robert Mueller said he, too, would leave if Bush overrode the Justice Department.

  Bush was thus confronted with the prospect of mass resignations that would almost certainly have drawn comparisons to Richard Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre” during Watergate. He backed down, agreeing to make changes in the component of the NSA program to which the Justice Department objected. Comey and the other officials stayed on.

  In the aftermath, Bush was angry with his subordinates. Although the dispute between Cheney and the Justice Department had been brewing for weeks, he said no one had informed him of it until the final days. “I made clear to my advisers that I never wanted to be blindsided like that again,” he later wrote.

  * * *

  Despite the turmoil inside his administration, Bush waged a smooth and competent reelection campaign. John Kerry denounced Bush for his decision to invade Iraq and for the overzealous handling of his campaign against terrorism. Kerry and many other Democrats assumed that the Massachusetts senator’s military service in Vietnam would establish his credentials and experience on national security, an area where Democrats had long proved vulnerable.